In which I did my film studies homework.

Close watching

I’m co-founder of a wee documentary production company. We’ve teamed up with two co-directors to work on our latest project. That makes three directors in all. Three creative opinions on everything, plus mine from the sidelines. It takes work but it’s working.

We’re feeling our way towards a shared vision for our film, which you can’t do unless you have a shared vocabulary to talk about creative decisions. One of our co-directors, Lia, is also a lecturer in film. She gave us some homework to help us get there.

Fast Horse is a short (14 minute) documentary about Indian Relay, “North America’s original extreme sport”. It won a special jury award at Sundance in 2019.

Lia gave us a spreadsheet that breaks out the 105 individual shots in the film. For each shot we had to write down how we thought it had been filmed (handheld, tripod, drone etc.), where the camera operator was in relation to the frame (standing, lying on the floor, close to the action, long lens from afar etc.), the storytelling role of the shot, and how the shot relates to those around it in the edit.

The exercise changes the way you look at film. Of course it does. Duh! But I don’t just mean the immediate, mechanical, frame-by-frame nature of the task. If you learn how to properly taste wine (I never did BTW), you drink it with greater appreciation. This was like that but for film.

It brought home the sheer number of aesthetic choices that are made, even for a short film. It made you think about when these choices are made - pre-production, on the shoot, and in the edit - and who is making them.

It was an intense, acutely conscious, highly attentive, and painstaking process; the opposite of mindless stream-scrolling. It was close watching, a filmmaker’s equivalent of close reading.

It was time well spent. Progress on our own film is faster and more fruitful for having done the homework.

Journalism or art

I took my newly-educated aesthetic sensibility to a Guardian Documentaries Showcase at Edinburgh’s Filmhouse. We watched four short documentaries, followed by a Q&A with one of the filmmakers and the Executive Producer of Guardian Documentaries.

Two of the films were about young adults dealing with tests and torments arising from the circumstances of their birth. But, while the films explore similar issues, their aesthetic choices are poles apart.

There’s an aesthetic choice that has profound consequences for documentary films. In fact it’s a definitive choice: the choice between journalism and art.

When The Revolution Doesn’t Come (see below) is about the children of the founders of the Black Panther movement. Born of momentous parents, these Panther Cubs have had much of their identity thrust upon them. Their adolescence involved coming to terms as much as it did coming of age.

The subject matter is fascinating, the delivery less so. The film uses a lot of talking-head interviews straight to camera. It’s a (lazy?) journalistic technique; one that’s all too easy to tune out of, or even nod off to in a darkened theatre, regardless of the poetry or profundity of what’s being said.

The trouble is that, when someone’s talking to camera like that, you might as well be listening to a podcast. You’re getting almost nothing extra from the visuals.

The Things We Don’t Say (see below) is also about a traumatised group of young adults. These are children born as the result of the mass genocidal rape of Tutsi women in Rwanda in 1994.

There are a couple of short, talking-head interviews. But the film is carried by a series of highly-charged conversations, in which we hear about the tragedy of children who struggle to accept their mothers, and mothers who struggle to accept their children.

We see a group of young adults open up to each other about shame and anger and injustice. And we witness a heartbreakingly awkward and tentative conversation between one of the protagonists and the mother he’s never been able to call “mum” as they fumble their way towards some kind of reconciliation. You can’t look away.

The journalistic interview aesthetic is a set-up. It’s a trope. Now matter how relaxed the interviewee is, they’re performing. They probably know the questions in advance. So the resulting film is stripped of spontaneity and contextual body language. The visuals are borderline redundant. It’s too easy to tune out.

Whereas being party to a candid conversation is gripping. The social animal inside us can’t help being fascinated by other people interacting with each other. We listen to what they’re saying. But we’re also watching how they react and respond to each other, subconsciously interpreting the body language so that we can fully grasp the meaning behind the speech. It’s showing as much as telling. You can’t help but lean in.

Similar aesthetic issues apply to advertising.

Remember Preston?

If the big choice in documentary is between journalism and art, the equivalent choice for advertising is between straight exposition and seductive entertainment. That’s not a perfect distinction. Creativity is never that binary. But it’ll do for this post.

In making these choices, advertising also has to wrestle with the aesthetics of speech. Although in some ways it has it easier than documentary.

A talking head in a TV ad is usually a celebrity, or at least a professional actor. They have an aura that makes them interesting before they open their mouth, and they know how to deliver a line when they do. You can get away with a talking head in an ad in a way that you can’t in a documentary. (Unless the documentary is about The Clash.)

It’s the truest of truisms to say that film is a visual medium. But it has consequences for how you handle speech. If you make the visual and verbal compete with each other, the visual will always win.

The trade-off, the risk, with a talking head interview in a documentary is that you create a lull in visual interest in order for the speech to be heard.

The risk of using a disembodied narrator is usually worse. Narration is set up to fail. Unless your narrator is David Attenborough, speaking words of sheer poetry, narration will always lose out to the compelling images that it’s commentating on.

It’s why I a have a strong aversion to advertising voiceovers.

My heart always sank when a creative team presented a script that relied on a voiceover. People don’t listen to voiceovers, not even in focus groups when they’re paid to pay attention. It’s ok when a voiceover delivers a punchline. Viewers will listen out for the resolution if they’re gripped by your story. But it’s a dicey decision to rely on your audience hanging on every word of a voiceover to get the message. Save your money and run it as a radio ad instead.

There are exceptions. It obviously depends on the context, the quality of the writing, and the delivery. The spoof commentary on the Tango Orange Man ad technically counts as a voiceover for example. It works because it’s properly integrated with the visual storytelling, and because the delivery is infectious and charismatic. But that’s not the case for the po-faced, corporate voiceovers used on all too many ads. They’re overlaid. They’re detached and therefore disposable. They say all the right things on the script, but they’re redundant in the real world where the film meets the audience.

Dialogue in an ad is a different matter entirely, just as it’s a different matter in documentaries. People talking to each other is as visual as it’s verbal. A lot of my favourite ads are based on dialogue: mini scenes, mini sketches, or mini soap-operas. The scripts behind them are mini screenplays. Sadly, there seem to be fewer of them about these days. Remember Preston?

People in Scotland might remember this one that I worked on back in the day.

And this is a classic: an ad that uses people talking to each other to encourage people to talk to each other more often.

And don’t get me started on LinkedIn video

Too late.

Suddenly it’s all talking-head video content over there. Yes, content, a word I despise. Content, by definition, is just stuff that fills a container. And LinkedIn is a bottomless container for talking heads talking vapidly into the void. The algorithm might be rewarding them with reach (for now) but it’s unrewarding in every other respect.

As with documentaries, as with advertising, the films that are worth watching on LinkedIn are those where people are making an effort with well-written, decently-performed dialogue. The sketch format in particular is doing well in a new home: e.g. Notting Hill - but for marketers.

Arty farty

Old farts who complain that advertising has been getting worse since the 90s get a hard time on LinkedIn. But, to an old fart like me, it’s an empirically sound assertion.

It feels like the more we learn about the neuroscience of advertising the more we forget about the art.

Today’s advertising creatives should dive into yesterday’s archives and do some close-watching homework of their own.